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Tim William Machan. Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 72; Issue: 304 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/res/hgaa105

1471-6968

Thomas L. Spray,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

On 14 August 1894, the writer Mary Disney Leith described her first sight of Iceland, a land already familiar thanks to the pages of George Webbe Dasent’s 1861 translation of the Old Norse Njáls saga. ‘Yes, there it was, the dream of my life, the desire of my eyes – familiar through long years of loving imagination; there it was in very deed. There lay Hjörleifs-höfdi, where many centuries ago the first settlers ‘took land’, and away to the west Thrihyrningr, and the sites of Bergthorsknoll and Hlitharend, the scenes familiar to those who have read Dasent’s splendid Story of Burnt Njal’ (Mrs. Disney Leith, Three Visits to Iceland, 1897, pp. 16–17). The Aberdeen-based Leith (1840–1926), cousin of poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, would go on to travel the scenes of Burnt Njal many times between 1894 and 1914. She was one of the many British and American travellers who made pilgrimages to the sites of battles and blood feuds in search of long-buried cultural ties, and in an attempt to create some of their own. Over a century later and inspired by his own trip to the saga-steads of Þríhyrningur, Bergþórshvoll and Hlíðarendi, Tim William Machan has laid out this fascinating story in his Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages.